Healthy Homemade Nutella Choc-Hazelnut Spread

I have a love/hate relationship with Nutella and it’s all to do with the product’s health claims and the ongoing insistence by the Australian branch of the company that Nutella can be ‘part of a nutritious breakfast’. There’s no way to convince me it’s good practice to suggest white bread with Nutella as your first meal of the day – not with an ingredient list like this:

There is only 13% hazelnuts and 7.4% cocoa in Nutella, but when checking out the nutritional panel you’ll find you get 10g of sugar in a 20g serving. It’s 55% sugar! There’s also vegetable oil, skim milk powder and some soy… mmm delicious, with extra sarcasm. Nutella is really a 55% sugar spread with rancid oil, a few nuts and a twiddly amount of chocolate. ‘Vanillin’ isn’t even vanilla, it’s more likely a nature-identical synthetic chemical used instead to keep costs down. Fantastic! Yummo!

Yes, I’m being extremely negative so far in this post, as I find it very hard to conceal my distaste for this widely-loved product. A problem with my snarky rage towards Nutella however is that someone else in my house grew up on Nutella and loves it – causing enormous tension when I finally refused to allow it in my pantry anymore. To help appease the situation I’ve spent the last few weeks perfecting a Homemade Nutella Choc-Hazelnut Spread (both for my partner and) for Our Growing Edge, a monthly blogging event aiming to connect and inspire foodie bloggers to try new things.

Use this homemade Nutella any way you would the original product (sandwich spread, a healthy sweet dip for fruit slices or the perfect ingredient to slather over a cupcake) and enjoy the goodness of hazelnuts and cocoa with chickpeas, coconut oil, coconut flour and real vanilla. It’s dairy-free, gluten-free and vegan. I’ve used a food processor to make this batch, so it’s a little less smooth than I would ideally like, I’ll make it again in my whizz-bang Optimum blender when it arrives in a couple of weeks and post another pic 🙂

Add raw or roasted hazelnuts to a food processor and process until you get hazelnut meal. Add remaining ingredients and process until mixture is of desired consistency - as smooth or chunky as you want (mine is a little bit chunky still).

Spoon into sterilised jars and store in the fridge for up to two weeks.

I love this recipe!! I really miss Nutella; I stopped eating it for the obvious reasons. I will have to try this out — on a German pan cake, maybe with some of that strawberry jam you posted a while back! Thanks for sharing this!
PS I love how you’re keeping an eye on what goes in your pantry 🙂

This looks great! I love the idea of making commercial spreads at home.

I haven’t bought Nutella in years and years. I did grow a new fondness for it when travelign through South East Asia and eating those greasy fried rotis smeared in nutella though. I figured the Nutella really was the least of the sins in that snack.

Thanks Genie, I love making the commercial brands at home. It’s a challenge but a lot of the time I like the homemade version a lot better! Depending how dark and rich you like your chocolate spread, 1 or 2 tablespoons would be all you need for a mighty chocolately spread 😀
You’re possibly right about the sin-scale of that South East Asian snack… they do sound mighty good though! Thanks for having me over at Our Growing Edge and thanks for the comment!

Hi Ally,
another winner! Well done. I have experimented in the past with homemade versions of Nutella… for obvious reasons 🙂 I don’t know how you came up with the chickpeas in there, but it works 🙂 Thanks for sharing!

Hi Kat 😀 Thanks for dropping by! The chickpeas came about from not having any peanuts in the house actually; one of my favourite homemade nut butters is peanut-hazelnut and one day I was out of peanuts 🙁
I had been wanting to make some Nutella for a little while and had some cooked chickpeas leftover from another meal. A quick google search later showed that some other people had played around with it similarly and I thus went and got cracking in the kitchen!

Yum, this sounds delicious. What do you think about substituting the coconut flour with buckwheat flour? Also I always soak nuts before eating them – do you think this would work ok with this recipe by just reducing the amount of water added I.e. less than a cup since the nuts will have been soaked? I was going to swap out the hazelnuts for cashews as suggested by someone above 🙂

Buckwheat flour would be fantastic Lisa, and would add even more of a ‘nutty’ flavour. Soaking the cashews would be perfect – they will blend even easier to – I’d say leave the water until just after everything is blended and add a little at a time until you get the consistency you want. Thanks for the commment 😀